I have long treasured words from the Book of Leviticus: “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God” (19:9-10). As if this wasn’t clear enough, the same injunction is restated in Leviticus 22. In his excellent book Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed, Simon Oliver suggests that the command in Leviticus is “a reminder that what we receive in creation is more than enough” (London: Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 155). In this vein, we could see the ancient practice of leaving a portion of the cultivated land for the poor and alien as a spiritual practice. Faced with profound anxiety about hunger and poverty, the temptation would be to save earnestly for the future, because the unstated fear is that there is not enough.
We, of course, know all too well this fear of not having enough. Every day, we receive subliminal and overt messages that we should be afraid of running out of whatever we need to survive. Scarcity is a very real thing in third world countries, not because God hasn’t provided enough but because resources have been distributed inequitably. Because some people choose to hoard out of fear, others suffer. But even in places where we are not starving or destitute, there is a throbbing fear: if there isn’t enough now, there will be or could be a time when there won’t be enough. Do what you can now. Save, save, save.
There is something in our spiritual practice of giving to the church’s ministry that echoes the Levitical command to leave some of the gleaning of the harvest for others. Our financial gifts to the church are, on the one hand, practical. The church needs money to support ministries, care for buildings, and pay staff salaries. But those practical needs enable something deeper, which is the spread of the Gospel. The Gospel is good news to the poor and alien. Gospel work is about seeking the lost, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and comforting the oppressed. Our spiritual gifts to the Church are, in some real sense, directed to the poor and alien.
But there’s more. The money that God has given each of us through our labor in the workforce is like the harvest of a good piece of land. We are sorely tempted to hoard as much of the gift of that harvest for the future, gathering up every last bit of the gleanings and reaping to the very edges of the land. And this is why the spiritual practice of giving is tough. We start with the assumption that all we have is ours by right or something that we’ve earned. In an earthly sense, this may be so. But giving from the edges of the land’s harvest reminds us that less than the full harvest is already enough. Moreover, the entire harvest isn’t ours to begin with. It is pure gift from God.
A gift is meant to be passed on. Generosity begets generosity. According to canon law, our church property doesn’t even belong to Good Shepherd; it belongs to our diocese. Ultimately, of course, it belongs to God. But still, each year, we hold a pledge campaign to raise money, partly, to care for property that doesn’t legally belong to us, because we are stewards of this property. So, the money we raise in pledge campaigns isn’t wholly self-serving but, rather, directed to caring for a gift entrusted to our care. And in caring for such a gift, we are able to leave gifts for generations of faithful Christians who will come after us.
There’s a kind of death in giving money away. It hurts to part with something that helps us feel secure. There’s always a nagging doubt about whether a generous gift will impair our financial solidity in the future. And when we give to the church in the form of a pledge, we are giving to a general operating fund. We are saying to the church that we trust her in how the money will be used. We are giving up control, and that is a real death for human beings.
The counter to our world’s deepest fears and anxieties is thankfulness, which itself breeds generosity. The more we become recklessly generous, the more we let go of our fears of not having enough. The Mass helps us learn to be thankful, because we know that ultimately there’s nothing we can give God that will ever be enough. And yet, God, week after week, day after day, gives us the Body and Blood of his Son for our nourishment and for the world’s very life. This ceaseless, ineffable gift is something we can only, bit by bit, come to receive as gift.
This past week, on several occasions, I have experienced generosity from several different people that has touched me profoundly. I have seen magnanimous gestures that are only explainable because they originate in genuine thankfulness. Those examples inspire me. We can be generous in so many different ways: through financial gifts, through kindness, through compassion. But every gesture of generosity must start with one thing: trusting that in the kingdom of God, there is always enough.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle